Just a little update on how the adoption process is going. I don't think I told you but after we thought we were done with the home study and it was sent in to our agency I caught a couple of things that our social worker had missed. So I quickly called her and we went over things and fixed the mistakes.

The problem actually was that the agency wanted to put Liz (our oldest and soon to be married) into an adult child category instead of adding her in with the children. This is the way I thought it should be all along, after all, she is going to be 21 next month. I kind of thought that the agency should classify an 18 year old as an adult. You see, according to our agency we cannot have more than 5 children living in our home if we wish to adopt a child from Ethiopia (unless you are willing to adopt special needs or a sibling group). But is an 18 year old technically a "child"? Especially if they are attending college or working full time? Well, in any case Liz is not only going to be 21 but she is also getting married and won't even be in the state of Michigan when our family dynamics change due to adding another child.

Anyway this is where the problems were with the home study. Some things were changed but Char forgot to change them in other areas of the paperwork. Not a big deal and at least we caught it in time. The good thing was, we had a cushion of time because we are still waiting for those two papers to come back from the Embassy/State dept. I talked to AAI yesterday to tell them to expect the replacement pages and to also give them the date that we sent in our I-600A (app. for advanced permission to bring an orphan into the country). They said that the two papers we were waiting for had not come back yet but should be there any day and then they will bundle everything up and send it on to Ethiopia! So, this means that within a few days we will officially be on the waiting list! Hip Hip Hooray!

Which brings me to a little story. Yesterday when I was at the Post Office bringing my I-600A to be mailed something happened that I wasn't expecting. Usually it is busy every time I go, but yesterday I happened to be the only one in there with 3 postal clerks working. I had just been there a couple of days before to mail the revised home study pages so the one clerk remembered me and we started talking about the adoption again. The next clerk over was thrilled and entered in on the conversation so the three of us were talking and the farthest clerk was listening (only for a second cuz he was a bit opinionated). He started in on me as to how old my oldest and youngest were and what age child we were adopting and how old was my husband and did I realize how old we were going to be before this child would leave home and didn't we want any time for ourselves and on and on and on....until the person that was helping me told him to shut up and help the next person in line. Wow. I wasn't really offended at the time because he was saying these things pretty nicely like in a "don't you realize..?" kind of way, although I was glad he was told to shut up. I kicked myself for not having something profound to throw back at him. I guess he caught me so off guard and then had to start helping another person that I really didn't have a chance to say my piece. I just wish I could have left him with something like "how can you look in the eyes of one of these children that have nothing, and still be able to say with confidence that it is way more important to have 'your time' without kids and 'your money' to spend on only yourself". Isn't there a bigger purpose for being placed on this earth than for you to only think of yourself? Not to mention the fact that we love kids and enjoy their company and are excited to be adding to our family. I don't know, there is probably something even better that I could have said but that is all I can think of right now. It's early, ya know??

Gotta go get started on my to-do list,
have a great day!
Wendy